REALITY DECIDED BY MAJORITY VOTE
(C)1999 Alan M. Schwartz
Philosophy brewed up when humanity hoarded enough wealth to
create leisure in which to kick back and think about thinking.
Greeks wallowed in it, their mild Mediterranean climate wooing
reveries without the impost of imminent starvation. Absent valid
rules for reflecting upon it, mankind had a threadbare grasp on
physical reality. Aristotle, Euclid and the like got things
moving. The latter performed splendidly, itemizing one of three
possible geometric universes (Euclidian zero curvature plane
space; Riemann's negative curvature hyperbolic space, and
Bolyai's and Lobechevsky's positive curvature elliptic space).
Aristotle's reasoning was flawless but he operated absent of
empirical data, so most of his deductions were laughable - until
the One True Church burned heretics for disagreeing with them.
Plato whined. "The Cave" is lauded as a landmark something or
other by people whose stock in trade comprises the maximum number
of gilt-edged complex and obscure words gouged into the smallest
possible concepts. Anybody who criticizes is obviously unfit to
judge. The Liberal Arts demand reworking of physical reality by
vogue vote wherein voluminous dialectic, critique, and dialog
proclaim value while original ideas languish. Whole forests have
been ground into paper smeared with Socialist theory and its
commentary, with footnotes. The Evil Empire of Soviet Russia was
forced to its knees and its head lopped off by America obsessed
with ladies' drip-proof panty liners. One stands amazed that a
really fresh ambience distaff crotch-wise could wither and geld a
nuclear power like dyspeptic Yahweh churning Jericho real estate.
Have no doubt that empirical reality - models of the universe and
its fillings defined and recursively validated by observation and
measurement - has striking power. Liberal wags dispute that
because reality disempowers those who decline to bear its burdens
of truth, and that is unfair. It is nicer to imagine First
Americans as peaceful noble protectors of the Environment than as
Neolithic Asian refugee squatters with a severely contracted gene
pool; ignorant, hungry, diseased, ornery, and frankly malodorous.
Hunting a 2000 lb bison on foot with a stone-tipped arrow is
nobody's idea of a good time. Horses were a European import, as
were guns and written language.
One could equally discuss revisionist ethnic and racial histories
as debate the relevance of leaving choice bits of dry salami
versus hard cheeses to delight elves who masquerade as the engine
of your car. It might be fun process and it might fill untold
books with progressively refined fantasy. If you ignore the Oil
Warning light on your dashboard those elves will transform into
burned, gauged, and fused scrap metal. Argue that away.
The singular effect of the soft sciences upon civilization is to
derail it - to progressively squander its material resources,
pollute its societies, destroy its essence and fabric, dilute and
nullify its vocabulary, and place poseurs and poltroons in charge
of plundering its productive citizenry. Religion as a subset is
too awful to detail, short of jackbooted Lutherans enforcing net
reproductive restraints on French Catholics, or Protestant and
Catholic Irish abundantly killing each other. Godspeed to every
bullet flying in both directions.
Mankind is unique in evolving through both slow genetic drift and
rapid technological change. The Industrial Revolution slammed
Homo sapiens' development into second gear, and ventured forth
thermodynamics. Those short of manipulating the calculus need
not apply. Relativity and quantum mechanics, and IBM's personal
computer cobbled together from spare parts and Bill Gates'
Microsoft and Marc Andreesen's Netscape, brought forth the
Information Revolution - third gear! The New Millennium loudly
promises direct genetic engineering of Homo superior, allowing
flesh to catch up to mind and fourth gear. The next tap of the
clutch is overdrive and the prerogatives of a god.
While flames howl from our headers as we banzai run down the
broad vast highway of posterity the Liberal Arts are squatting in
roadside ditches, cursing. Outlook-oriented goal-mediated
compassionate outpourings delivered Project Head Start, Welfare,
debauched public education, jurisprudence purely incapable of
convicting violent felons, a cancer of government programs and
their metastatic bureaucracies, a plague of subsidized drug
addicts, a plague of subsidized HIV parasites, a plague of
professional homeless, and a plague of ever greater calls for
more compassion and more studies and more money. The USSR and
East Germany proved hiring one quarter of the population as
informants does not assure even 80% overall compliance. The War
on Drugs enjoys yearly budget ten times greater than the annual
aggregate funding of all US medical research, and to do what?
It is a sticky philosophical conundrum.